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DISCOURSE 



FIRST CHURCH AND SOCIETY 

IN NEAV HAVEN, 

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NOVEMBER 24th, 1859. 



LEONARD BACON, 

PASTOR. 



NEW HAVEN: 
PECK, WHITE AND PECK, 

PRINTED BY E. HATES. 

1859. 

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ISCOURSE 



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CH AND SOCIETY 



IN NEW HAVEN, 



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iftattbgiuimg, 



NOVEMBER 24th, 1859. 



BY 



LEONARD BACON, 



PASTOR. 



NEW HAVEN: 
PECK, WHITE AND PECK. 

PRINTED BT E. HATES. 

1859. 



New Haven, Nov. 25, 1859. 



Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D., 

Dear Sir— The undersigned having heard the Thanksgiving Sermon delivered 
by you in the Center Church, yesterday, and being impressed with its appro- 
priateness and value, respectfully solicit a copy for publication, hoping that 
much good may be accomplished by the dissemination of the truths therein 

contained. 

With sentiments of highest regard, 

We are very, respectfully, &c. 



Leonard Bradley. 
E. T. Foote. 
Hervey Sanford. 
E. S. Hubbard. 
Thos. R. Trowbridge. 
Justus S. Hotchkiss. 
Henry White. 
Alfred Walker. 
Henry Peck. 
John English. 
Eli W. Blake. 
James Winship. 
Stephen Bishop. 
Arthur D. Osborne. 
Chas. Atwater. 
John Ritter. 
J. C. Ritter. 
Chas. Thompson. 
B. Silliman, Jr. 

W. HlLLHOUSE. 

H. Olmstead. 
James Dwight. 



Simeon Hoadley. 
John B. Carrington. 
Jas. M. Townsend. 
Henry C Kingsley. 
Eli Whitney. 
Alvan Wilcox. 
Joseph Brown. 
Lucius Hotchkiss. 
S. Hayes. 

B. W. Stone. 
George Treadway. 
Benj. Noyes. 

C. B. Whittlesey. 
Amos F. Barnes. 
Dexter Alden. 
Charles Robinson. 
Leonard Winship. 
Alex. C. Twining. 
B. Silliman. 

Wm. L. Kingsley. 
Horace Day. 



John Anketell. 
Thomas A. Thacher. 
C. S. Lyman. 
L. J. Sanford. 
Abraham Sanford. 
R. Bake well. 
H. B. Smith. 
Wales Smith. 
John Lane. 
Forrest Shepherd. 
Ezra Hotchkiss. 
Elisha Dickerman. 
Newell C. Hall. 
James Fordham. 
Leonard A. Daggett. 
Charles A. Judson. 
Henry D. White. 
Chas. H. Oaks. 
E. Hayes. 

G. WHITING. 

S. Mead. 



The subscribers cordially concur in requesting a copy of the Rev. Dr. Bacon's 
Thanksgiving sermon for publication. 
Nov. 25, 1859. 



Henry S. Dawson. 
Geo. Gabriel. 
B. L. Hamlen. 
Seymour Bradley. 
A. C. Wilcox. 
Samuel Noyes. 
Chas. W. Allen. 
H. Hotchkiss. 
T. B. Atwater. 
Wm. Dickerman. 
R. W. Bradley. 
Chas. Winship. 



L. G. Cannon. 
Jonathan Knight. 
E. C. Read. 
E. H. Trowbridge. 
D. R. Larned. 
Willis Bristol. 
Geo. D. English. 
Stiles French. 
James Walker. 
S. Dole. 
L. L. Bishop. 



Alfred S. Monson. 
Wm. B. Hayes. 
Truman French. 
Chas. Dickerman. 
S. A. Barrows. 
J. Miller. 

Nathan H. Sanford. 
D. L. Daggett. 
J. P. Dickerman. 

SCOVIL HlNMAN. 

D. S. Barnes. 



New Have*. Dec. 12, 1859. 

Messieurs. Leonard Bradley, E. T. Foote, Hervey Sanford, and others : 

Gentlemen— In complying with your kind request for the publication of the 
sermon preached on Thanksgiving day, I may be allowed to say that I have 
in leavored carefully to reproduce those parts of the discourse which were not 
previously committed to writing. I trust that the discourse as printed will be 
found identical in thought and effect, if not in every expression, with the dis- 
course as spoken in your hearing. 

Thanking you sincerely for the friendly regard implied in your desire to 
read, and to communicate to others, the thoughts which were addressed to you 
on that occasion, I am, respectfully, 

Your servant in the gospel, 

LEONARD BACON. 



DISCOURSE. 



Isaiah liv ; 13, 14. — And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord ; 

AND GREAT SHALL BE THE PEACE OF THY CHILDREN. In RIGHTEOUSNESS SHALT 
THOU BE ESTABLISHED : AND THOU SHALT BE PAR FROM OPPRESSION, FOR THOU 
SHALT NOT FEAR ; AND FROM TERROR, FOR IT SHALL NOT COME NEAR THEE. 

The prophecy of this chapter is rightly interpreted, by all 
Christian expositors, as descriptive of God's mercies and benefits 
to his Church under the reign of the Messiah — in other words, 
to the spiritual and mystical Israel, the commonwealth in which 
Christ is King. But the imagery under which the safety and 
blessedness of the Church are represented to our conception, is 
of such a nature that it is at the same time descriptive of the 
prosperity to which the civil and secular commonwealth of Is- 
rael might attain by virtue of its relation to the God of Israel. 
The words of our text, in particular, describe with great propri- 
ety and force, the felicity, the stability, and the security of any 
well ordered and enlightened Christian State. In whatever com- 
monwealth or country, the knowledge of God, of His law and 
government, and of the way to honor Him and to be at peace 
with Him, is generally diffused and practically accepted — in 
whatever country or commonwealth that prophetic description, 
" All thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall 
be the peace of thy children," has become in some sense a real- 
ity — there also, and in the same degree, the other promises of 
the text are beautifully realized. 

We keep this festival to-clay as citizens of Connecticut. This 
public thanksgiving — this assembling of the people in their pla- 



6 

ees of worship to praise the God who fills the circle of the year 
with His goodness — is at the call not of our National or Federal 
Government, but al the call cf our own Chief Magistrate, the 
chosen successor of those who have been chosen to the same office 
by the annual vote- of the people, ever since our heroic fathers, 
two hundred and twenty years ago, laid the foundations of 
afire I I oxistian commonwealth here in the wilderness which 
they had chosen for 1 1 e. The subject matter of our pub- 

lic thankfulness to-day is not merely those benefits which we 
enjoy in common with all the people of this great Continental 
Union, but also those benefits, if there be any such, which we 
enjoy in distinction from the people of other States, and by the 
blessing of God on the patriotic foresight of our fathers. If 
we, in our compactly settled townships with the primitive de- 
mocracy of their municipal governments — if we, in the widely 
diversified industry of our people, giving opportunity for every 
sort of talent to find occupation, and drawing wealth from the 
soil and the mine, from the land and the sea, from resources at 
home and resources abroad — if we, in the provision which has 
been made among us, not only for the education of the whole peo- 
ple and the general diffusion of useful knowledge, but also for the 
advancement and cultivation of those higher departments of 
knowledge which give ornament and glory to a State as well as 
riches— if we in the prosperity and strength of our religious in- 
stitutions, in the growing harmony and mutual charity of our 
Protestant Christian bodies, and in the general prevalence of a 
sound religious influence over society — if we, in the equity of 
our laws and the fidelity with which they are executed — if we, 
in the liberty which is the legal birthright of eveiy human 
being born upon our soil or coming among us from foreign 
lands — if we, in the general consciousness of safety with which 
our entire ition lies down to sleep at night, and rises up to 

work by day — have any benefits superior to those which the 
providence of God has given to other States, or to the inhabit- 
ants in other regions of our common country — all this we may 



remember to-day, not in pride as if we were therefore Letter than 
others, but in humble thankfulness to the Giver of all good 
whose sovereign bounty has allotted to us so goodly a heritage. 
Among these distinctive blessings, none are more worthy of 
devout commemoration to-day, than those which are compre- 
hended in the fact that a knowledge of God, and a reverence for 
His law as supreme, are so widely diffused among our people, 
and hare to so great an extent given shape and character to our 
institutions and our laws. "We cannot indeed say, absolutely, 
that all our people are taught of God — we have reason to lament 
with shame the religious ignorance and the gross ungodliness of 
which we see so many manifestations within the boundaries of 
our privileged Commonwealth, but we may say that the "great 
peace," the eminent prosperity, the general felicity of our peo- 
ple, is because, through all the generations of our history, the 
children of our fathers have been so generally taught of God, 
and because the knowledge of the Lord and a salutary deference 
to His law as paramount to every other law, have had, even to 
this day, so much effect upon the common sentiment of our 
people and thus upon our legislation and government as a State. 
Great as our deficiencies are in this respect — and that they are 
great none of us can venture to deny — the theory of our laws 
is, and their aim is, that every man shall render to his neighbor 
that which is just and equal ; and by the favor of God, this is the 
prevalent sentiment and spirit of society among us/ Our Con- 
stitution, indeed, as framed some forty years ago, excludes one 
class of men, for their complexion, from all participation in po- 
litical power — just as it excludes all persons under twenty-one 
years of age, and all who have never paid a tax nor rendered 
any military service ; but neither our Constitution nor our laws 
have ever confounded the distinction between that political power 
which in the most consummate democracy must needs be in 
the hands of comparatively few, and those civil rights which 
belong to all/ Our laws, so far as they proceed from' our own 
power as a State, are founded on the great Christian principle 



8 

that underlies and expounds the Divine commandment, "Thou 
slialt love thy neighbor as thyself" — the principle that one God 
has made of one blood all nations of men — the principle, in 
other words, that all men are created equal, that is, with an 
equal right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. 
They are founded on the Christian principle that civil society or 
government — however the form of it may be determined by cir- 
cumstances and by the explicit will or the implicit acquiescence 
of the people — is God's institution for the benefit not of the 
strong, nor of the crafty, nor of the fortunate, nor of any supe- 
rior or privileged class, but of all ; that magistrates are therefore 
God's servants for good to all alike, being divinely invested with 
power for the punishment of evil doers and for the praise and 
protection of them that do well ; and that all who come within 
the jurisdiction of the government have an equal right to its im- 
partial protection. The theory of our laws is that the State has 
an equal interest in the perfect welfare of every human being 
that lives within its boundaries; and therefore their aim is that 
no child shall grow up on our soil in stolid ignorance, unable to 
read the laws that rule him and that guard his rights and the 
book of God that offers him a citizenship and an inheritance in 
heaven. The theoiW' of our laws is that no man shall be de- 
prived of an}' human right, except in punishment of crime 
whereof he himself, and not his supposed ancestor among the 
sons of Noah, shall have been judicially convicted. The theory 
of our laws is that every man, so long as he does not invade the 
rights of his neighbors, or imperil the welfare of the State, is to 
choose his employments for himself; to cultivate and exercise 
his faculties in his own waj 7 ; to read what he will; to speak 
and publish what he believes; and to enjoy the certaint}^ of le- 
gal protection in his industry and in his honest gains, in his 
person and in his family, in his religious faith and worship and 
in hi.- home, All this results from the knowledge of God so 
generally long our people, and from the influence of 

that knowledge upon public sentiment and thus upon our laws 



and government; and it is just this — it is this equal freedom and 
protection for all — it is this unlimited scope for the free play of 
all human impulses, affections and sympathies in every mind — it 
is this that gives to the industry of our Commonwealth its in- 
tense and restless activity, its ever increasing diversity of occu- 
pations, its keen sagacity in every direction, its all-enriching pro- 
ductiveness. It is the activity of every human faculty se1 free to 
do its work under the prompting not of fear only, but of hope and 
love — it is the protection of impartial justice overshadowing alike 
the richest and the poorest, the strongest and the weakest—it is 
the wide diffusion of God's word revealed from heaven, the vital 
element alike of justice and of freedom for all— it is this which 
makes our rugged land so beautiful to us who dwell in it, and so 
venerable to the myriads who to-day, in other States and other 
lands, or on the sea, are looking back toward old Connecticut 
with filial love. 

But let me turn your attention more distinctly to one par- 
ticular aspect of God's beneficence towards us the people of 
this free Commonwealth. It is suggested, and in some measure 
illustrated by the text. "In righteousness shalt thou be estab- 
lished,"— that is, justice shall be thy stability and security. 
"Thou shalt be far from oppression"— far from depressing and 
crushing apprehensions— " for thou shalt not fear; and from 
terror for it shall not come nigh thee."" It has been the lot of 
other communities to live in the perpetual sense of danger— not 
only of danger from what may occur in the order of nature un- 
der the providence of God, danger from pestilence, from tem- 
pest and flood, from destructive drought or frost, from accidental 
conflagration, from earthquake or volcano— but danger from 
human violence more terrible than tempest or pestilence, more 
awful than earthquake or volcanic fire— danger from invading 
or insurgent enemies. But how complete and constant is our 
feeling of security ! And what is the reason of this ? At Paris, 



* Perhaps a more just paraphrase would be, "Thou .-halt be exempt from con- 
quest and subjugation, for thou shalt have no fear ; and from devastation, for it shall 
not come niirh thee." 



10 

at Venice, at Vienna, they live in a chronic fear of insurrection. 
At Naples, they live where a burning mountain stands ever in 
their Bight, with its column of vapor condensing into a smoky 
cloud far up in the clear sky, and they walk over ancient cities 
buried deep in lava and volcanic ashes ; yet their chief terror is 
not so much the fiery flood that may at any hour begin to be 
poured out upon them from the mountain, as it is the eruption 
of human violence, the alarm of insurrection and of bloody 
revolution. In almost any city of France, one stave of the Mar- 
seillaise, carelessly whistled in the theater, would be as dangerous 
as a spark among barrels of gunpowder — one stanza of that wild 
war-song, in the streets, would be more terrible than any fire- 
alarm, for it would call out in a moment a frenzied and insurgent 
populace. Why is it that we have no such apprehension to de- 
press and crush us with its perpetual weight? Simply because 
in God's good providence, we find our State, our laws and insti- 
tutions, the whole structure of society among us, established 
in kighteousn'ess. Simply because, in God's good providence 
towards us, the history of Connecticut has been such that, to- 
day, impartial justice, established in our laws, guards with equal 
hand the rights of all. No race of conquerors lords it over us 
in military strength, provoking us to insurrection in the name of 
justice. No servile class beneath our feet is waiting for the hour 
of vengeance. Thank God for this — not boastfully but in hu- 
mility ! We have not achieved this safety for ourselves.; He has 
wrought it for us. 

To-day all this comes to our thoughts the more naturally, and 
the more impressively, for its connection with recent events 
which have filled this entire Union of States with a strange ex- 
citement. I need not repeat the full story of those events. A 
little company of men, only twenty-two in all, under the cap- 
taincy of one whom oppression had maddened., attempted to lead 
forth an exodus of slaves from their house of bondage in Vir- 
ginia to a land of promise beyond the Niagara and the Lakes. 
So wild was the absurdity of the enterprise, that it may be 



11 

doubted whether anybody as yet has been able to comprehend 
it. But it would seem that the slaves, if they would accept the 
opportunity, were to be armed for self-defense ; and then, if Pha- 
raoh and his host should pursue them, the liberty of this new 
Israel was to be achieved in battle. In the prosecution of their 
plan, whatever it was, the twenty-two adventurers, by a bold and 
sudden stroke, seized an armory of the United States which, 
ought to have been under military superintendence but was not; 
and in so doing, they obtained possession and command of a 
town containing two thousand inhabitants. An instantaneous 
alarm was spread not only through the neighborhood but through, 
the State. No slaves dared to show themselves, or to express 
any sympathy with the invaders. Large bodies of militia has' 
tened to the seat of war. United States' soldiers were sent in 
hot haste from the Metropolis. The end was what just every- 
body not quite bewildered knew it must be. After some des- 
perate fighting, and some loss of life on both sides, the armory 
was recovered, and the surviving invaders, wounded and bleed- 
ing, were captured and delivered into the custody of the law. 
They have had their trial — they have been convicted of more 
crimes than were laid to the charge of Barabbas— they have 
been sentenced to death ; and in just eight days from this hour, 
the Moses of that abortive exodus — a hero in the native elements 
of his character, and born of a heroic as well as saintly line — a 
peaceful and loyal citizen till his long meditation on " the op- 
pressions that are done under the sun" had crazed his brain — and 
even in his monomania a man of faith and prayer— is to die up- 
on the gallows. Meanwhile the alarm occasioned by the out- 
break is not allayed, but is becoming daily more portentous ; nor 
can we reasonably wonder if it grows more cruel, for nothing 
stimulates to cruelty like terror. At the same time, the excite- 
ment of various passions around us here, and in all parts of the 
Union, is growing, I will not say more perilous in its political 
relations, but more perilous to our moral sentiments and hab- 
its, and more perilous to the just influence of sound principle 
among us. 



12 

Lei me aaj than frankly, as becomes the place in which I 
Btand, what there is that seems wrong in the modes of thought 
and ion which are in some sense most natural to us, at 

^ais distance from the scene, and with our deep and reasonable 
abhorrenceol s'avery. Lndeed it is for this purpose that. I have 
adverted to the great and painful excitement of the hour. 

1. It is wrong to deride, or to despise the great terror that 
seized upon the people of Virginia, and that is not yet allayed. 
We should not fail to remember that they had good reason to be 
terrified, and that nothing has yet occurred, or is likely to occur, 
that ought to quiet their fears. Nor should we forget that there 
are circumstances in which the bravest men may fear ; for cour- 
age, in the honorable sense of the word, is a very different thing 
from foolhardiness. The condition in which the entire popula- 
tion of Virginia find themselves at this crisis, instead of being 
such as to justify derision or contempt, demands rather our sym- 
pathy and pity. 

What is the terror there? What is it that makes them afraid? 
Many of as, I fear, misunderstand the matter — some through 
ignorance of the facts, others through inconsiderateness — -just as 
the people of Virginia misunderstand our sentiments and feel- 
ings. The difficulty there — the terror — is not that individual 
masters are particularly afraid of their own slaves. Doubtless 
some masters have that terror, and have good reason for it ; but 
in many instances, not to say generally, the relation between 
master and servant has something of domestic intimacy and 
mutual kindness in it. Strange as it may seem to the unin- 
formed and unthinking, there is many a slave, no doubt, who 
.Id tight and die in defence of master and mistress more 
readily than in the assertion of his own freedom. Incredible as 
the statemenl may seem to those who accept a certain kind of 
anti-slavery declamation as unerring truth, many a slave there 
is who feels that, deeply as he is wronged, it is not his master 
that has wronged him. Do we not know that conspiracies among 
slaves for a sudden rising, and a simultaneous slaughter of the 



13 

whites, are almost invariably betrayed by some partner in the 
plot, whose affection for his master or his master's family, 
overpowers his fidelity to his comrades in the conspiracy, and 
who therefore is constrained to give some warning, or some 
hint, by which he hopes his master may be saved though 
others perish. 

The great and constant peril in Virginia, and in every State 
similarly situated, is of another sort. It is that the State in its 
laws and social order is not established on the foundation of 
righteousness. It is not merely that there are two races of 
men mingled together on the same soil ; but it is that these 
two races are mingled together in a relation essentially hostile, 
the one an enslaved class, the other an enslaving class. It is 
that there is a class of human beings spread over the whole 
area of the State, whose human rights the law refuses to pro- 
tect or recognize — a class whom the State regards and treats 
only as enemies, and who therefore are the enemies of the State, 
owing it no allegiance in law and incapable of treason against 
it. Nor is this all. They are not treated by the State as 
civilized enemies taken in war are treated ; they are treated as 
savage enemies ; and it is not too much to say that though 
born on the soil of Virginia, where their ancestors have lived 
and died for several generations, they are savages. Whatever 
has been done to civilize them, has been done by individual 
masters and mistresses for their own servants, and by the inci- 
dental and inevitable influence of contact with a superior race. 
The State, the dominant race which is the State, does nothing 
for their civilization — it makes no provision for their education — ■ 
it sets before them none of the incentives, and voluntarily en- 
compasses them with none" of the influences, by which they 
might be progressively civilized — its avowed and settled policy 
is that they shall be savages and slaves forever. Such is the 
danger. It is just that danger which is inseparable from the 
presence of a hostile and essentially savage population diffused 
through the whole State; quartered, as it were, in every dwell- 



14 

ingsave the dwellings of the poor; large masses of them accu- 
mulated in certain districts, and hardly any district where they 
are not numerous enough to light a sudden conflagration, when- 
ever they dare to do so either in hope or in despair; everywhere 
made continually conscious of their debased condition and their 
legal disabilities ; everywhere their souls filled with the stifled 
but burning memory of ages of oppression. Why should not 
a people in such a condition be afraid? Why should they not 
tremble — all alike, the enslavers and the slaves — at every report 
or sign of insurrection? Why should not even the feeblest and 
most inconsiderate invasion of their borders, in the name of 
emancipation, send a tide of terror through the State? Not to 
be afraid in the continual presence of so great a danger, would 
be fool-hardiness rather than courage. Not to be startled at 
what may be the signal of insurrection, when insurrection means 
not merely civil war but servile and savage war, the outbreak of 
rapine and devastation, and the letting loose of universal rage to 
execute an indiscriminate slaughter — would be no indication of 
true manliness. 

Some of us have heard the story of what happened at Rich- 
mond, a few days ago, while the late General Convention of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church was sitting there. The story is ex- 
aggerated perhaps in some points, yet it is neither improbable in 
itself nor discreditable to anybody's courage. W T e are told that 
the Convention was holding an evening session in one of the 
churches, thronged with a great assembly, and that the Governor 
of the State was there. A telegraphic message came to the 
Governor and he went out. Soon it began to be whispered what 
the message was, and that it brought the news of an insurrec- 
tion at Harper's Ferry. The business of the meeting went on, 
notwithstanding the excitement, till suddenly the gas which 
lighted the building ceased to flow, the lights went out, and dark- 
ness fell upon the city. Think what an alarm that was, and 
how reasonable. A failure of that sort happens here sometimes, 
but nobody thinks of being alarmed ; nobody thinks that per- 



15 

haps it IB the signal for conflagration and massacre. If we 
should be affrighted at such an accident, we should deserve to 
be derided for our fear. Not so where there is a servile popula- 
tion everywhere present in the State, an ignorant and therefore 
savage class, a class inexorably deprived of human rights, and 
therefore implacably hostile to the commonwealth. There it is 
reasonable to be alarmed at every sign or hint of insurrection. 
Nor should we judge them harshly or contemptuously, if in their 
habitual and inevitable fear they infer, from our professed abhor- 
rence of the injustice which is the basis of society among them, 
that we also are their enemies — ready to arm their slaves against 
them. Perhaps it is not possible for us to exorcise them of their 
prejudice; but let us not confirm their jealousy by laughing at 
their calamity and mocking at their terror. 

2. It is wrong to blame the authorities or the people of Vir- 
ginia for defending themselves against invasion, or for asserting 
their sovereignty as a State. The soil of Virginia was invaded 
by an armed force with hostile intentions. Had that force been 
commissioned and sent forth for the same purpose by some re- 
cognized foreign government, (that of France, for example, or 
of Great Britain) who woilld have blamed the authorities or the 
people of that State for repelling the invasion? Who would 
have blamed them for maintaining in arms the sovereignty of 
their government, or for making whatever demonstration (not 
contrary to the international law of the civilized world,) might 
be necessary for their security against future inroads from abroad ? 
They would have said — and the universal mind of Christendom 
would have been with them — Our State is under the dominion of 
no foreign power, nor is it amenable to any foreign intervention ; 
and those who come among us to put down our laws, and to es- 
tablish on our soil, by force of arms, another government than 
ours, shall find none other than a bloody welcome. And if the 
people of that State would not be blameable for defending their 
own sovereignty on their own soil, and putting their laws in 
force against a British or a French invasion, how much less are 



16 

they to be blamed for defending their sovereignty and putting 
their laws in force againsl an armed invasion by private individ- 
uals acting on tlnir own responsibility alone. 

The firsl great principle of the moral code which regulates 
the intercourse of nations — the principle which guards the peace 
of the world, and without, which there is no security for free- 
dom anywhere — is that which forbids the intervention of any 
sovereignty with the internal legislation or administration 
of another, save by the moral power of opinion and remon- 
strance Whatever may be the right of a people to cast down 
by insurrection a government which they have found intolera- 
ble, and to establish another in its stead — whatever may be 
their duty in regard to tie' injustice incorporated with their laws 
and with the structure of their government — it is none the less 
their right, and none the less their duty, to defend themselves, 
their soil, their laws, and their sovereignty, as a commonwealth, 
against an armed and military invasion from whatever quarter. 
Unarmed intervention — intervention by moial influences that 
act on thought and opinion, and that reform the minds of men 
and nations — intervention by argument, by expostulation, by 
rebuke, in spoken or in written words, in picture or in song — • 
intervention by the testimony of men who are willing to go to 
prison and to death for the truth of which God has made them 
witnesses — peaceable intervention by whatever peaceable meth- 
ods — is a very different thing. Such was the intervention of 
the Apostles and early confessors of Christianity with the estab- 
lished polytheism of the Roman empire. Such was the inter- 
vention practiced by the men who, at the era of the Reforma- 
tion assailed the dominant superstition, when they went from 
one countiy to another disseminating the prohibited truth at 
their own peril; tilling the minds of men with new ideas: preach- 
ing where tiny could; talking where they could not preach; em- 
ploying the capabilities of the newly invented art of printing; 
agitating by w^vy peaceful method the great question of the 

: and, ll arrested, yielding a passive obedience to the exist- 



17 

ing powers, and going bravely to the dungeon, to the rack and 
to the stake. The violence that resists such intervention with 
established wrong, reacts against itself for itprovokea the •■in- 
sure and in time the indignation of the world. But an armed 
intervention whether of kings, or of uncrowned and uncommis- 
sioned adventurers, volunteering to adjust the interna] govern- 
ment of a country not their own — an intervention that proposes 
to reform by violence, and to extend the area of freedom by in- 
vasion and conquest— justifies, before the tribunal of the world's 
opinion and of history, an armed resistance and an effectual 
suppression. 

3. It is wrong to permit our admiration of the indisputably 
heroic qualities which distinguish the leader of that invasion, 
and our sympathy with the unselfishness of his motives, to blind 
or pervert our judgment in regard to the intrinsic unlawfulness 
of his attempt. I will not say anything to you in disparage- 
ment — and surely I need not say anything in honor — of that 
man's courage and cool firmness, which have extorted admira- 
tion from his enemies ; of his whole-souled devotedness to what 
he considered to be his duty ; of his cheerful readiness to suffer 
the loss of all things, not counting his life dear to himself in 
comparison with the cause which he had espoused ; and of his 
manly and Christian sympathy with the oppressed, putting him- 
self in their place and ready to die for them. There are few 
who have not read the letters which he has written from his 
prison, and which, though written to particular friends, have ob- 
tained an unintended publicity ; and none can read them without 
feeling the grand simplicity of soul that breathes in them. How 
strikingly do they combine a childlike unaffectedness and uncon- 
sciousness with the calm dignity of a hero and the faith and self- 
sacrifice of a martyr ! In our admiration and our sympathy, we 
are in danger of forgetting the contrast between the romantic 
heroism and Puritan godliness of the man, and the intrinsic 
wrong of the mad and fatal enterprise for which he is to die. 
3 



18 

If wc would guard our own souls' health, we must not forget 
what the error was into which he fell. What was that error ? 
lie assumed the right of making war against an existing and es- 
tablished government. After having been long employed in 
collecting arms and munitions of war, he began the execution 
of his plan by invading peaceful homes, seizing the property and 
persons of men over whom he had no authority, and shooting 
down those who resisted his proceedings. God had not made 
him a magistrate to administer justice between the oppressor and 
the oppressed, still less had God invested him with despotic au- 
thority to rule at his own discretion by military force ; yet he 
dared to take into his hands the sword not of self-defence but of 
justice. His error was that in his love of justice, and in his pity 
for the wronged, he became an armed insurgent against a gov- 
ernment which, even if you affirm that it is no better than 
the government of Nero, is nevertheless a government in fact — 
an "existing power" — and therefore, according to the Apostolic 
definition a " power ordained of God." Doubtless he acted from 
a high sense of duty. He verily thought that he ought to un- 
dertake a work which, at the first stages of its expected success, 
was sure to be attended with all the horrors of a deadly conflict 
between the enslavers and the slaves. But was he risdit in think- 
ing so ? Is it right for Don Quixote to go up and down in the 
world, delivering the oppressed and rectifying all wrongs, at his 
own discretion and with his own good sword ? Plainly, there 
are some errors into which a sane man cannot fall without guilt ; 
and this is one of them. If that brave old man, now waiting 
for his death with so sublime a cheerfulness, is indeed a saue 
man, his error, whatever it may avail before God who knows the 
depths of our infirmity, could not excuse him at the tribunal of 
any government on earth. For such an attempt as his there is 
no excuse but that of a mind which has lost its helm, and through 
the ascendency of some illusion generated by disease, has be- 
come incapable of discerning things as they are. The hallucina- 
tion under which he acted, and which had been growing upon 



19 

him for a score ot years — the illusion which had possessed him so 
long, which had blended itself with all his thoughts of duty and 
of devotion, and which had gained strength from his struggles 
and his sufferings — the dream that God had commissioned him 
to be a liberating Moses and a conquering Joshua — is what re- 
lieves him from the intrinsic criminality of his attempt. Acting 
under an illusion that had mastered his reason and had subjected 
all his faculties to its control, he has exhibited, and I doubt not 
will exhibit till the tragedy shall end, just those traits of charac- 
ter which command the sympathy even of generous foes. But 
if, in our admiration of those personal qualities made so con- 
spicuous, we forget for a moment that it is wrong for a citizen of 
one State to make an armed foray into the territory of another— 
wrong for a citizen, without authority other than that of his own 
sword, to seize the property of other men and to take their 
persons captive — wrong for him to kill those who dare resist in 
arms his armed invasion of their soil— our highest moral senti- 
ments and instincts will be in danger. Under the influence of 
such sympathies, the glowing indignation which the sight of 
huge injustice wakens in every manly soul, may kindle the ma- 
lign emotions into a lurid flame ; and philanthropy itself, for- 
getting the precepts of Christ and his Apostles, may degenerate 
into chronic wrathfulness and hate. We need not cease to pity 
the enslaved, remembering them as if we shared their bondage; 
we need not cease to regard with a just abhorrence that great 
wrong which while it crushes them is reacting with so many re- 
tributive effects on the States that enslave them ; but let us none 
the less be watchful against the temptation of the hour, and 
pray, "Deliver us from evil." 

It will help us against all the temptation of the hour, if we 
remember, in a humble and thankful spirit, that it is God, and 
no wisdom or goodness of our own, that has made our condi- 
tion to differ so widely from the condition of those who dwell 
where society is not yet established in righteousness. God in 
his own wisdom has given to us this goodly heritage. lie 



20 

spreads around our homes this constant safety. He has exempt- 
ed us not only from the fears which hang in a perpetual cloud 
over regions fairer and sunnier, and far richer in the gifts of na- 
ture, than our own, but also from those temptations to maintain 
that wrong is right and to contradict and stifle the instinctive 
moral sense, which are so powerful where society itself is an or- 
ganized injustice. Surely none but a base and thankless mind 
can fail to derive from such a thought as this a lesson of humil- 
ity in respect to ourselves, and of forbearance and charitable 
judgment in respect to those whose condition is less privileged 
than ours. Surely a serious and reasonable mind cannot fail 
to derive from the thought that it is God who has thus dis- 
tinguished us, a lesson not merely of thankfulness but of high 
resolve and earnest aspiration. With our experience of how 
blessed a thing it is for a State to be established in righteous- 
ness, shall we ever forget, for a moment, that our responsibil- 
ities — our duties to God, to our country, and to succeeding 
generations, are commensurate with our privileges ? Let us 
stand like men, testifying to the world, in our thankful devo- 
tion to God, that there can be no peace to a commonwealth, 
no pledge of prosperity, like that which comes from the uni- 
versal diffusion of knowledge and especially of the knowledge 
of God ; and no stability like that which ensues when the 
State is established in kighteousjsess. 



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